


It's a Wonderful Life

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Series: Minato Namikaze and the Destroyer of Worlds [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Attempted Murder, Existentialism, F/M, Female Harry Potter, Friendship/Love, Illnesses, Master of Death Harry Potter, Murder, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 16:44:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15778056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: After the disastrous confrontation with Lee's assailant during their first C-rank Lee teleports herself and Minato to an unfamiliar Konoha decades in the future. There they are forced to confront the world where Lee doesn't exist and Lee's own growing illness.





	It's a Wonderful Life

**Author's Note:**

> Obligatory note that this is NOT CANON.

_There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man._

_It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge._

_This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone._

 

* * *

A young red headed girl with green eyes desperately clutching at the wound in her ribs that was a little too deep and a little too precise.

 

Across from her was her silent assailant covered in shadows and already taking the step to deliver what was certain to be the final blow. Her blood smelled like fresh iron, like something metallic and gleaming.

 

Next to her were two stunned and sleeping boys who had long since been dealt with one with hair yellow like lemons fattened on sunshine.

 

The girl was Eru Lee, a genin of Konoha in a recently forged and unstable era of peace between the five great villages, and although she was perhaps more powerful than any genin to come before her she was just as inexperienced. Eccentric, confident, and now dying Eru Lee’s options were becoming limited.

 

In this still and silent frame Eru Lee was about to make a desperate final push for survival, an action that would send her and Namikaze Minato straight into the heart of the Twilight Zone.

 

* * *

 

Everything was jarring.

 

There was a bright flash of light, almost out of nowhere, and blinking into awareness Minato realized that it was the sun. That was the first thing he noticed, that the sun was there when it shouldn’t be, because he should have been woken up for his watch before sunrise and judging by the sunlight it was high noon.

 

Then, the second thing he noticed, was the smell. A warm metallic smell that he knew almost instinctively but had never encountered in this quantity before. His head rolled to the side and he caught of Lee, hunched over and clutching at her stomach, staring past him with an intent expression as if all of her energy was focused on some goal he could not see.

 

And she was bleeding profusely.

 

“…Lee?”

 

She offered him a small humorless smile but said nothing. Minato rolled into a sitting position and watched as she slumped forward, onto the only recently built war memorial which listed the names of those who had died in service of Konoha.

 

He looked up, past her, and met the eyes of three unfamiliar genin and their equally unfamiliar jonin sensei and then he looked past them to the hokage monument and counted not three but four heads.

 

And Minato realized that whatever had gone wrong, whatever had happened, had just sent him and Lee very far from home.

 

After that it was mostly a blur of shock, him stating his name and the name of his sensei, telling it again when they only stared and did nothing, rushing Lee to the hospital and watching as they carted her off into some room where he wasn’t allowed to follow, and then sitting in the waiting room staring at walls for what seemed like an eternity.

 

Somehow, in the middle, between meeting with a Yamanaka (a man who called himself Inoichi who if Minato could process what he’d seen on the mountain might even be the Inoichi he knew from the academy) and staring at walls he found himself explaining to the foursome he had met what he thought had happened.

 

They had stayed, longer than they needed to given that he didn’t know them and they didn’t know him, he and Lee had interrupted their training after all and they could have left to finish it. Certainly the Uchicha always looked on the verge of leaving, leaning against a wall with a perpetual look of distaste and irritation plastered onto his features, but so far he had not made a move towards the exit and neither had anyone else. They all just sat there, waiting, listening to the ticking of the clock and waiting for something to happen.

 

“Time is relative.” He started in a musing tone he almost couldn’t recognize from himself; as if he was discussing the weather, “It’s an aspect of space, a fourth dimension, it’s not always linear or what you would think of as consistent.”

 

Here he stopped, thinking further, allowing his mind to drift from the reality of Lee bleeding out in a training field seven that wasn’t their training field seven, “Light, light is consistent, it’s the ultimate speed in the universe. No matter how fast you move you will never be faster than light. Teleporting, then, is moving at a speed close to that of light so that it seems instantaneous. But if you move at that speed long enough then time relative to you is different from time relative to where you’re going. If you move fast enough then a second to you could be a year at your destination or even ten… You just have to be moving fast enough for long enough.”

 

This wasn’t in any of their academy textbooks, or even in the shinobi library as far as he and Lee had found, most physics in Konoha stopped at what Lee had labeled as mechanical physics, calculating the speed and destination of a travelling kunai. This was practical but Lee thrived in the realm of the theoretical in not only the how of a jutsu but the how of chakra itself, and so things like time dilation, general relativity, and special relativity were solely in her domain.

 

The sensei, a man who looked very much like Hatake Sakumo or at least from what Minato could see given that the man’s face was covered by a mask and one of his eyes by his hitaei, nodded at this shorty and looked perhaps even more uncomfortable than he had the entire day.

 

It was the boy who looked like Minato, with blonde hair and blue eyes and a blindingly orange jump suit, who responded, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

 

“It means that sometimes when you’re travelling quickly through time and space you end up possibly decades into the future while your best friend is bleeding out in a hospital and you realize that you don’t recognize anyone and the people you do are…” Forcibly he cut himself off and forced a smile onto his face, “Well, I suppose it’s a good thing that I’m used to bizarre things happening on an almost weekly basis.”

 

No one had anything to say to that.

 

Somehow, listening to the ticking of the clock and just waiting, that seemed appropriate.

 

* * *

 

The first day bled into a few weeks with relative ease and as they did a few things became clear.

 

Wherever Lee had taken them it wasn’t the future of Konoha, at least, not the Konoha he knew. It was almost the same, he saw familiar if older faces, heard familiar names, and even visited the same ramen shop in the heart of the town.

 

But there were a few things missing and eventually Minato realized they all boiled down to one thing; in this Konoha Eru Lee didn’t exist. The nidaime and shodaime had never been resurrected, Namikaze Minato had been unrivalled in the academy and outside of it in his generation, Uzumaki Kushina had been almost kidnapped by Kumo, and no doubt thousands of other things Lee was directly or else inadvertently responsible for.

 

So it wasn’t really his future, which in some ways as he stared at that fourth head on the mountain was relieving, because while this Namikaze Minato became hokage he also was forced to sacrifice himself for it.

 

Minato would sacrifice himself for his village, if he had to, but it was different knowing that and being forced to realize that someday you would. This future was avoidable if only because it didn’t stem from his past.

 

So it didn’t bother him as much as it could have that Minato had died here, that Hatake Sakumo had died here, that Orochimaru had performed monstrous human experiments and betrayed the village, that the entire Uchicha clan had been wiped from existence except for one single genin and his brother the missing nin murderer, that Uzumaki Kushina had died, that the nidaime and shodaime were dead and had stayed dead, and so much more.

 

Lee had said more or less the same thing, when he first was allowed to see her and they were more or less convinced that she was a Konoha nin. Of course she had said it in her usual Lee way, which amounted to a small shrug as if this was all more or less interesting but ultimately irrelevant.

 

“I guess this sort of counts for you becoming hokage though… We’ll have to tell everyone when we get back.” She said as she looked out the window at the view of the mountain range and Minato’s older carved face.

 

(He looked so serious up there, so very imposing, his carved eyes no less intimidating than Senju Tobirama’s, as if there should be no doubt that the yondaime Namikaze Minato belonged among their ranks.

 

Minato’s potential, always a weighing thing, seemed almost crushing whenever he met those stone eyes.)

 

“When are we getting back, Lee?”

 

She looked so pale in that hospital bed, paler than usual, and while she was more aware of her surroundings it was clear that she was not in peak condition either. In that bed, in that hospital gown, she looked almost like a normal little girl, like she was anyone else.

 

“When I get out of stitches and the walls stop spinning.” She finally said as she narrowed her eyes at the walls as if commanding them to stay still, “I’d guess about a week, tops, given my ridiculous healing rate and ability to endure pain. In the meantime, go read some of that Jiraiya porn you said they have in the bookstores and see if it’s any good.”

 

Hatake Kakashi offered Minato a temporary spot on his couch and dubiously watched as Minato slowly but surely worked his way through Jiraiya’s Icha Icha novels (which was sort of painful to read because he could just picture his sensei narrating all of this with glee and he really didn’t need to know any of this) and time started ticking by.

 

One week passed, he visited her, and she just shook her head looking somehow paler and her forehead covered in sweat, “Not yet, the walls are still woobly, try again later.”

 

He started exploring Konoha, loitering around training field seven and watching Sakumo’s son interact with his genin. And he really had never been more appreciative to Jiraiya in those moments because Jiraiya at the very least always tried and always took them seriously, and while he may have written the porn that Hatake Kakashi was so fond of reading on duty he at least had left most of his super pervert antics out of their daily lives. He also wasn’t at least three hours late to everything, a habit that probably would have driven Lee up the wall had he been their sensei, or would have just given her far too much freedom and would have resulted in disaster.

 

He’d hear cries about youth and springtime from a distance and would sometimes catch a green blur with the worst haircut yet best teeth he had ever seen on a human being bound past him with a smaller matching green blur bounding behind.

 

Occasionally he’d meet with the hokage, relate his experiences of the past, try to figure out what had happened to the Lee in this Konoha and if she had simply stayed in England never joining him in the orphanage.

 

Most of the time though was spent next to Lee’s hospital bed, staring out the window, and wondering when the right time was going to be and how everyone at home was doing without them. Had Jiraiya started looking for them? Had the client survived the skirmish with the jonin, had Haru?

 

By the time the third week passed it struck him, in the middle of the night as he sat up from Kakashi’s couch, that he had grown complacent. He almost bolted to the hospital right then, in the middle of the night when visitors hours were long over, because he felt that complacency in this moment was next to death.

 

If he grew complacent here and now then he couldn’t help but feel that everything would slip through his fingertips.

 

* * *

 

“Not another fence, Kakashi-sensei, these aren’t real missions at all! I can’t paint anymore fences!”

 

Naruto was the only one who bothered to say it, or at least scream it, but it was clear from Sasuke’s look of distaste and Sakura’s dismayed expression that his other cute little ducklings were more or less feeling the same way.

 

This of course was after the usual chorus of “You’re late!” from Naruto and Sakura and his own rambling Obito-esq explanation of why it was perfectly reasonable for him to be three hours late to meet them.

 

A normal day with another D-rank and another chance for Kakashi to come to terms with the fact that he was the sensei to the last Uchicha and to his sensei’s son the jinchuuriki of the very beast that had killed his father and almost destroyed Konoha. He’d almost managed to forget about it, of course Naruto didn’t help by almost screaming Obito, Sasuke a younger version of himself, and Sakura a more hapless Rin, but he felt he was almost there.

 

He had been, even at the end of the bell test when he’d looked at them and only seen his own disastrous past staring back, except not because he was nowhere close to being the man that Namikaze Minato was. Minato-sensei had been a great man, perhaps the only man who could have dealt with that team, and Kakashi was so far from being him that it was painful. Still, he had been coming to terms by the end of that bell test, when he had uttered those words Obito had branded into his head.

 

Those who break the rules are trash, but those who abandon their friends are worse than trash.

 

He hadn’t been ready for a younger genin version of sensei to show up with a bleeding red headed girl he’d almost mistaken for Kushina on the memorial out of nothingness.

 

And now Minato-sensei lived on his couch, read Jiraiya’s porn almost as religiously as Kakashi (because dammit how did he say no to his sensei even if his sensei was somehow twelve), and every once in a while would wander his way over to team seven and quietly observe them.

 

And he was… different than how Kakashi remembered him. Maybe it was because he had been older and dating Kushina, maybe it was because he’d somehow been thrown forward in time to a future where he had been hokage but had also been dead for over ten years, but this Minato was quieter and also his eyes a little sharper. He tended to wait, watch, and listen but occasionally he would offer insight that was… bizarre yet somehow brilliant.

 

Minato-sensei rarely talked about hiraishin, especially with those who weren’t already seals masters, but when Kakashi had asked this younger Minato-sensei over take out ramen the boy had been more than willing to talk about his theories behind time travel as well as teleporting; something he claimed he couldn’t do but his friend could.

 

His friend who no one remembered existing, a genin named Eru Lee, who according to Minato-sensei was the greatest ninjutsu user Konoha had ever seen.

 

But that was something Kakashi couldn’t quite process yet, let him get over the fact that he was responsible for sensei’s son, that his sensei had somehow returned from the dead but didn’t recognize him beyond being his Hatake Sakumo’s son (how long had it been since anyone had thought to say that, since anyone had linked the disgrace that was his father to Kakashi in public, how long had it been since he had allowed himself to remember the great shinobi his father had been before that fateful mission). The last thing he needed right now was to consider someone Minato-sensei seemed to think of as all powerful who by Konoha’s records didn’t even exist.

 

Now, he had to deal with Naruto whining about D-ranks, which was an adorable and completely solvable problem, “Well then, Naruto, I guess you don’t want to be hokage after all.”

 

“No way, I will be hokage, believe it! But I know hokages don’t do dumb things like finding cats!”

 

They had this argument almost every morning and Kakashi still found it entertaining somehow, he had never realized how much fun there was to be had in pushing the buttons of arrogant genin, it almost made him wish he’d passed one of those teams of brats before this bunch, almost.

 

Except this time Minato-sensei seemed to have enough of it, even before Sakura could shut Naruto down to gain Sasuke’s attention, and said, “Naruto, why don’t you just make shadow clones to do it?”

 

Minato-sensei’s eyes flicked up from his borrowed Icha Icha Tactics novel, blue and piercing and somehow so different than Naruto’s despite being the same color and shape, and he made no move to jump down from his cross legged position on the railing.

 

“When Lee and I had to do ridiculous amounts of D-ranks she spawned her suicidal clones to do it instead.” Minato-sensei said not bothering to explain the concept of suicidal clones or how a genin would be able to produce so many that it would require words like spawn, “Most people don’t have access to clones like that, it’s good to remember your advantages.”

 

And then with glee Naruto was no longer his hopeless dead last but instead his eager clone machine that produced a dozen clones all ready and willing to paint all of the fences in Konoha and beyond.

 

It'd still ended more or less in disaster when the clones had realized that painting fences as a clone was still as unenjoyable as painting it as a human being, which then spurred Sasuke to decide the whole thing was a waste of his time, which then spurred Sakura to start bickering with Naruto in order to improve Sasuke’s mood.

 

But never the less they’d gotten the D-rank done far quicker than they would have and it was clear that none of them seemed to grasp the implications of almost limitless shadow clones the way Minato-sensei so clearly had.

 

“That wasn’t very nice of you, I enjoy crushing their spirits.” Kakashi would say later that night and Minato would just give him this look, a small wry smile as if Kakashi had just made a good joke.

 

“Don’t you want to know what they’re capable of before they get out there?” Minato asked and then added, “Don’t you want them to know what they’re capable of? Our first C-rank didn’t go… well, it would have gone worse if Lee didn’t know what she was doing.”

 

“…Lee is your friend.” Kakashi said lamely and Minato nodded.

 

“My best friend, since we were five.” Minato said and then added, “Of course, she doesn’t seem to exist here. Which is kind of… reassuring. It means I don’t necessarily have to die before I’m thirty.”

 

Kakashi said nothing to that, because there wasn’t anything he could think of to say, they had checked and checked again and this was Minato-sensei. His chakra signature matched, his blood, his mind, the majority of his memories, but that girl was something else. Kakashi didn’t know the details but he knew that both she and Minato-sensei had a near constant ANBU guard and that the investigation into her was still ongoing.

 

Because if what Minato-sensei believed was correct, about her abilities and her potential, then all of Konoha’s chess masters would soon be making their move. If they hadn’t done so already.

 

There were only a few people Kakashi truly cared about, allowed himself to care about, and after the majority of them had died he couldn’t bring himself to add one more to his ever shrinking list. With sensei’s desperate loud son, a vengeful Uchicha heir, and now sensei himself he didn’t have the time or energy for one more.

 

“She should be better.” Minato finally said when the silence had stretched too long, “She’s never been hurt for this long before, she should be better by now, she said a week at most but every time I see her she looks worse… She didn’t even wake up last time I visited.”

 

“Jiraiya should be back soon.” Kakashi finally said, “I’m sure he’ll agree to train you again… and if not…” If not Kakashi would do it, would take Minato as an apprentice just as Minato once took him on as an apprentice when he had nowhere else to turn.

 

Even if it somehow destroyed the past by ripping Minato-sensei from it, destroyed his own team again, he would do it until they could get him back to the past and even if they could never get him back to the past.

 

“No,” Minato said the word solitary and final, “She will get better and we’ll go home.”

 

* * *

 

On the last day there was someone vaguely familiar in Lee’s hospital room.

 

Occasionally when Minato visited he would find the sandaime in there, Yamanaka Inoichi, or even Hatake Kakashi, but as far as he knew this was the first time this man had visited. Minato knew of Danzo, had heard of him here and there, but never met or spoken with him.

 

But there he was now, standing over Lee’s bed and simply looking at him as she stared back, looking more aware than she had in weeks. Her eyes were burning, that bright fierce and almost inhuman green color, the kind that could fuel nightmares if you only let it.

 

And then they both looked to Minato at the same time and Danzo gave a small polite bow before leaving the hospital room, Lee’s eyes tracking him as he went.

 

“Are the walls still woobly?” Minato asked.

 

“The woobliest.” Lee said, her eyes narrowing at the doorway and then drifting over to the I.V. dripping into her arm. He waited for her to say something else, to say what Danzo had wanted with her, to tell him the latest thing from the hospital but she said nothing and eventually drifted off to sleep.

 

It was then that it began to occur to him.

 

Lee was getting worse every day, her wound had closed a while ago but she looked paler and feebler than ever, and as his eyes darted to her chart he felt a pit growing in his stomach at what it might say. The medic-nin in the hospitals had been giving him looks recently, pitying, and he’d tried to ignore them but…

 

But Lee wasn’t getting better, Lee was dying in this place, and when it came down to it this wasn’t his Konoha.

 

With trepidation he looked at the chart at the end of her bed, flipping through the pages, and although he didn’t understand all of it the general idea of it was clear.

 

Poison. Poison either from the blade then or…

 

(What did a man like Danzo, who had never met Lee, want with her in a hospital room where she was on the verge of death? Who were these people and why was he so certain that they were the same as the people he’d known before? Why was he so certain that they were on his, on their, side?)

 

But that was all beside the point, irrelevant almost, and so he calmed down leaning over her and thought of what he did know.

 

Poison they couldn’t cure, poison she was only surviving because she was Lee, but poison that was slowly burning its way through her and one of those days she wouldn’t wake up from her latest nap.

 

She was already drifting away, out of reality and his reach, as if walking purposefully ahead of him into the night, the light of her becoming dimmer and dimmer until it disappeared completely into the horizon while all he could do was stumble desperately behind.

 

Minato would sacrifice himself for Konoha, just like this other Namikaze Minato had twelve years before, if he had to he would gladly do it. But this wasn’t his Konoha, not his hokage, and they were asking a price that was very high.

 

If Lee stayed here she was going to die. Jiraiya had always said there was only one medic-nin who was better than any other, and she had left the village years ago.

 

So really, there was no choice, because Lee was worth far more than a Konoha he didn’t know.

 

 

“Come on, Lee, time to go. I know the walls are spinning but if we don’t move soon there won’t be any walls to spin anymore.”

 

* * *

 

About halfway, following Lee’s pointed directions, Lee started babbling in English. Minato knew a fair amount, more than anyone else besides Lee in Konoha, but there were words she said he had not even realized existed. Lee had learned his own language so quickly that he had never had to become truly fluent in hers.

 

She talked about anything and everything, some of it about where they had come from, about Danzo and a young medic-nin in training called Kabuto, about whispers of Orochimaru, and about everyone and anyone coming to see her.

 

_“Everyone wants a blood sample or else a bit of poison in there. And then job offers, if they wanted me to work for them then why would they poison me in the first place? Seriously creepy old man with eyeballs in your arms, and then blaming it on mystery regenerating jonin? Not cool, not cool at all, and also who has eyeballs in your arms? I feel like that would just hurt a lot, like having sand in your eyes constantly, and what does it do anyway? Give him super depth perception or give me epilepsy with all the red and spinning… And everything’s getting fuzzy again.”_

 

He didn’t think about what she was saying too much, because in the next moment she’d be remembering the lyrics to songs written by beetles, but none the less with each passing moment he’d do his best to walk a little faster as she leaned against him.

 

Keep her talking, keep her awake, and keep moving those were his only goals now.

 

He just had the feeling that they weren’t moving nearly fast enough.

 

He wasn’t sure what he should be expecting though, hunter-nin, Jiraiya, ANBU, only that they would surely want both of them to return and he couldn’t do that yet and he didn’t know if he wanted to. Because it was fine but it was unfamiliar and frankly wrong.

 

There was something broken in Hatake Sakumo’s son, in the hokage himself, maybe even in Jiraiya since he wasn’t even in Konoha. A Konoha without Lee in it was a Konoha with far too many names decorating memorial stones and too many unfamiliar faces. This was a Konoha that didn’t have to come into existence, that Minato wouldn’t let come into existence, and so he had to turn his back on it.

 

If he was complacent then he condemned Konoha and himself to that path of death and destruction.

 

So he must keep walking.

 

* * *

 

Lee’s fever returned and with trepidation Minato was forced to stop and set up camp, all the while his eyes cast back in Konoha’s direction, but she couldn’t travel in that sort of condition and with only the light of the crescent moon to guide them he knew they wouldn’t be getting anywhere at any rate.

 

So he waited, placing a wet cloth on her head, insisting she eat something (anything), and he waited quietly for either her fever to break or morning to arrive.

 

“ _Glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever.”_ Lee said as she lay on her back, staring up at the stars, her eyes reflecting their light even through the daze of fever, “ _Who said that, Minato? I know who said it but I can’t…_ ”

 

“I don’t know anyone who said that.” Minato said but Lee didn’t seem to hear him, just kept staring upwards at the stars.

 

_“Did you know, Minato, that the light we see from starts is from thousands and thousands of years ago? Every time we stare into the sky we are staring into the past and perhaps a thousand years from now we will have realized that these stars have long since stopped existing. We see only the echo of them.”_ She paused here and all at once there was such a bitter look of sorrow on her face, a tragically human expression of someone who was being torn apart by the seams.

 

“No, I didn’t know that…” He trailed off and grasped her hands in his, “But that’s okay, because… We’ll make it, we’ll get you better and we’ll go home.”

 

“ _There was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one._ ” She paused and finally turned her eyes from the heavens to look at him and for the first time in a long time spoke in his native language, “Minato, remember that even if I disappear from the past, from the future, you’ll still have an echo of me for at least a thousand years. It might be empty, it might be a shadow, but it’s…”

 

Before he could insist that she wasn’t going to die, that she wasn’t allowed to, that he would walk into the pure world and back before he let her footsteps sounded. Lee’s head turned to the trees and Minato slowly and silently reached for his kunai.

 

Lee raised her hand with a look of intense concentration and then Uzumaki Naruto, Haruno Sakura, Uchicha Sasuke, and Hatake Kakashi were thrown into the middle of the camp. Hatake was on his feet before they could blink but the three genin took more time getting up, Minato didn’t lower the kunai.

 

“We don’t have time to return to Konoha.” He said shortly his eyes cutting through each of them and waiting for one of them to flinch, “With the death of Namikaze Minato twelve years ago I am no longer a Konoha nin, as a civilian I can go where I please and I am choosing not to go back.”

 

“But why would you want to leave Konoha at all?” The blonde, Naruto asked, and it was funny because he of all people should know why Minato must leave Konoha. Minato had seen how the civilians treated him, like he was some kind of a demon, surely he of all people would realize the Konoha he lived in was not all it presented itself as.

 

“Senju Tsunade doesn’t live in Konoha.” He said instead, because that was easier to explain, and was something that these people would accept. Because how did one tell someone that their reality was wrong, that it was missing something crucial and integral, how did one explain that when they were already running out of time.

 

“Minato-sen… Minato-kun, how do you even know where to find Tsunade?” Kakashi asked, and then added in a tone that had already buried Lee and scratched her name upon a grave, “She would be more likely to survive in Konoha.”

 

“She was dying in Konoha.” Minato spat out before taking a breath, centering himself, and then saying, “If I let her die, simply because it was easier, then what does that make me?”

 

“…Those who break the rules are trash but those who abandon their friends are worse than trash.”

 

With a sigh of relief Minato lowered his kunai because although Hatake Kakashi had not said it, was a cryptic and strange man at the best of times, a little bit of his father was peeking through and he would not drag them kicking and screaming back to Konoha with Lee’s corpse in his arms.

 

Then, out of nowhere, Lee was sitting up and staring at them all, “ _It’s the Twilight Zone._ ”

 

She stood then, looking past them all, and as she did so the trees drained of what little color they had and soon everything was a wash of black and white.

 

The jonin tried to break the genjutsu but Minato knew better, he might not be great at detecting them but he knew better than that. Minato knew Lee’s genjutsus and this wasn’t one of them, this was starker, clearer, it lacked the fuzziness of a genjutsu and the acceptance of one. The genjutsu was designed so that you weren’t taken aback by it, so that you accepted this, everything in this was surreal and unnerving.

 

“Lee…” Minato started but she wasn’t listening, was instead grinning as if she had just figured out a puzzle.

 

“ _This is the world where I don’t exist, where I’m fading from existence, being forced out of existence. Reality is falling apart and everything that seemed clear is fading. I might not even be here at all in this moment._ ”

 

“What is… Is that a different language? What’s she saying and why is everything…” Sakura was asking looking towards their sensei but Kakashi wasn’t saying anything.

 

“She has a fever.” Minato said the danger of that thought finally striking him, “Lee can manipulate reality and she has a fever.”

 

“What do you mean she can manipulate reality?” Sasuke, the boy asked, his eyes narrowed.

 

“I mean she can bend space, time, bring back the dead…” Do all of those things that chakra hinted and teased at but didn’t seem to provide to the most brilliant and stubborn of jonin.

 

They didn’t have a chance to say anything to that because Lee was talking again, rapidly in English, her eyes still staring out towards the horizon and Minato only catching every other word, “ _I can fix it, I can change it into something closer to what it was. It’s like a tapestry, there’s a few threads, a few key threads, and if you cut them or reweave them a different picture forms._ ”

 

Then her expression turned solemn and her eyes turned to Uchicha Sasuke, in that moment none of them existed save for the Uchicha, and beneath her gaze he seemed so small and fragile in spite of the fact that she was the one who was dying, “The name of the man you’re looking for, it’s Danzo.”

 

When Sasuke didn’t answer she walked over to him, looking more inhuman than she ever had before, and with each step she took plants sprouted and wilted her footsteps, “You swore on the death of your family that you would kill the man who sent them to the slaughter. Itatchi was only the blade, Danzo is the name of the man you’re looking for.”

 

“What are you…”

 

“His hands are covered in the blood of dozens of children, your dead relatives stare out of his arms with unseeing eyes, if you want revenge then Danzo is the man you’re looking for. Unless, of course, you don’t really want revenge.”

 

“What would you know about what I want?”

 

“You want what you think you can get. You can’t return Itachi to what he was, your clan to what it was, so you promised yourself the only thing you thought you had left. But I can do many things you can’t, and if I’m leaving, if I’m fading then I have to… I have to fix this place. I have to be more than a simple echo, I want to live before I die.” She reached down and touched Sasuke, her hands on his shoulders, and asked, “Do you want to go back to the way things were?”

 

He didn’t have to nod, didn’t have time to, but whatever silent answer he gave was more than enough for Lee because reality was warping again. The black trees stretched backwards and the sky alternated between white, grey, and black and as it did so the others shrunk until the genin looked as if they were still in the academy and then suddenly their camp was gone and they were flung back into Konoha.

 

A Konoha that was frozen in time, Uchicha walking in the streets, one in particular catching Uchicha Sasuke’s attention, “Itachi…”

 

The boy looked around his age, he couldn’t be much older, but there was a certain haunted look to him that was usually only worn by those of higher rankings (his eyes were dull even in this strange black and white world).

 

Sasuke stumbled forward, his teammates and sensei standing uncertainly and warily behind him, but as he did so Lee’s voice rang out, “Of course, it’s not enough. Bringing them back, turning time backwards, isn’t enough. There’s still the coup d’état and there’s still ANBU and there’s still Danzo. So many actions lead to the next, the exile of Uchicha Madara, the war in Ame, the disappearance of Uchicha Obito, the death of Nohara Rin, the Kyuubi attack, and then the coup and the massacre. So where do you stop? Where can you stop?”

 

“You stop here, Lee.” Minato interjected quickly, because he could see the strain on her already, she wasn’t in any condition to use these sorts of jutsus whatever she was doing and she didn’t need to.

 

She just looked at him then and it was as if the world around them was disappearing, everything dripping away until it was only him and Lee left, no sign of the team who had come for them, “This world will destroy you, Minato.”

 

The color returned slowly, her hair growing from a faint distant orange to the bright red he remembered so well, and as it did so a still and empty lake appeared beneath their feet and a shogi board between them.

 

“I think… I remember playing a game of shogi with you, a long time ago. Do you?” She sat down on one side of the board and played the opening move, Minato sat across from her and picked up a piece not knowing what else to do.

 

“Lee, you’re sick, we need to find Tsunade and…”

 

“There was a great fire and a giant fox and… And you asked me to save your village, your people, in exchange for your soul.”

 

Reflected in the water beneath them were two different figures, a pale man dressed in black with a hood over his features, feather like black hair almost obscuring those bright and terribly green eyes. Then, across from him, with a solemn expression was that older Namikaze Minato dressed in the robes of a hokage, his face grim and his eyes burning.

 

“And I said that…” Lee trailed off and the man in the water spoke for her, only his voice wasn’t masculine, it wasn’t feminine either but something in between and barely human for it, “Your soul is only worth half of the bijuu.”

 

The other Minato responded, not faltering, “That isn’t good enough.”

 

“When you measure a soul, against a soul, existence against existence then it has lived and altered much more than you have Namikaze Minato. That is simply the way things are.” The man played a piece, and above him Lee played the same piece, “If you choose to accept this then you will seal half of the bijuu into your son, there will be death, war, and destruction but one day he will rise above it and lead the nations into a new era. But we could make some other bargain.”

 

"What other bargain could we possibly make?”

 

“You could still save your village, your people, you could turn back so that this moment would never come into fruition. You can shoulder the burdens you would place on your son; your soul is worth more than that.”

 

Here the man stopped talking and Lee looked across at him her eyes burning intently and said the words for him, “You are the summit of what humanity can be, of what it aspires to, you can rewrite the world in your image and make the Konoha Senju Hashirama once dreamed of as a reality. To rewrite the world, however, the price is to rewrite yourself.” 

 

* * *

 

He opened his eyes, he hadn’t realized they were closed, and found himself staring at a too bright white fire where the hotel used to be. Lee was sitting next to him, bleeding once again but no longer looking on the verge of death (her fever gone and the poison as well).

 

For a moment they stared at each other, neither saying anything, and then behind them came sensei’s voice, “Holy shit, the hotel is actually on fire.”

**Author's Note:**

> Someone I think asked for a fic where Mintao and Lee catch a glimpse of the future that could be and we end up with this wonderful story.
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments, kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


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